My favorite of the development aid innovations I’ve come across: the Lifestraw! The Lifestraw is a simple looking device: essentially it’s a plastic tube, containing a powerful water filter. This filter is capable of killing bacterial and viral pathogens and filtering particles down to the size of 15 microns. The Lifestraw itself costs only about […]
The UAE and the Saudis have made a lot of news earlier this week with their steps to choke BlackBerry data services in their countries. Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry, came up with a particularly clever system for securing their devices. CEOs, as it turns out, don’t like the idea of anyone […]
Tom Engelhardt expands on the same point I made earlier this week about the hypocrisy of the Pentagon’s condemnations of WikiLeaks. Read Engelhardt’s post here. He ties the issue into the general media bias against U.S.-caused civilian casualties. For example, the highly emotional, attention-getting Time magazine cover, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan,” could easily […]
On April 6, 1994, President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda was assassinated as his plane descended to Rwanda’s Kigali airport. It remains unclear who was responsible for the attack but everyone knows what happened next. Somewhat less well-known is France’s role in the training, arming, and supporting of the Hutu government and its violent paramilitary groups. […]
USAID is to be commended for creating and successfully implementing a program in Egypt that combines the best of development policy and US higher education resources. The LEAD Program (Leadership for Education and Developoment) anually selects two students from each of Egypt’s 27 governorates to attend the American University of Cairo. The scholarships are reserved […]
Dysfunctional Senate seems to me to be redundant. Nevertheless, there are those who, with noses held closed, continue to try to deal with a legislative body that is, by its very nature, undemocratic, and by long habit, works in ways that are infuriatingly inappropriate to the creation of good public policy. What choice do we […]
Researchers at the University of California, Davis have discovered that breast milk sugars promote the growth of a subspecies of bacteria important to protecting a baby’s intenstinal lining. The NYTimes reports: Dr. German sees milk as “an astonishing product of evolution,” one which has been vigorously shaped by natural selection because it is so critical […]
The sale of Newsweek has people in the media industry scratching their heads. Partly because it went to California tycoon Sidney Harman (who has now media experience), and partly because of the numbers behind the deal. According to the Columbia Journalism Review’s (CJR) analysis of Newsweek’s numbers (courtesy of The Daily Beast), the company was […]
With the leaking Gulf oil well apparently under control, and the spilled oil mysteriously vanishing, the Obama administration has come under pressure from journalists to declare “mission accomplished.” It is understandably unwilling to do this, partly because things could still go wrong and partly because of the phrase’s unfortunate political baggage. According to the virtually […]
As newspapers continue their steady financial decline and the press is criticized for everything from false news reports to jeopardizing national security, those of us who live in the comfort of a democracy may start to say, Who needs them? There are plenty of blogs to fill the gap, and as tech-savvy critical thinkers trained […]
Recent news suggests that the Obama administration is once again buckling to the pressure of labor unions, this time by pursuing trade sanctions against Guatemala. Yes, Guatemala. Forget that this is the big guy beating up on the little guy, or the rich guy beating up on the poor guy, Guatemala has signed a free […]
I wanted to flag two new books to you and a review of them. The first is The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet by Heidi Cullen and the second is The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Eleventh-Hour Fight to Save the Earth […]
“A President McCain would almost certainly have subverted the schedule and tried to keep more troops, and more active combat troops, in Iraq than the Iraqi legislators wanted,” wrote Juan Cole earlier this week. Cole was referring to the Status of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the United States, which states in Article 24: 1. […]
The media is often used by those with competing messages to disseminate information or dis-information. Sometimes, though, the message is a lie. Vietnam is an unfortunate example of manipulating the media and choking free speech for their own destructive ends. Just yesterday, several Vietnamese writers were given honors for their work under severe pressure from […]
Thirty-eight US billionaires have pledged at least 50% of their wealth to charity through a campaign started by investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. See the list of donors here, and August pledge letters here. Generous and impressive. Thank you! (But don’t you just love initiatives “specifically focused on billionaires”?)